The objective of this three-year request for continued funding of the Black Identity and Mental Health Research Project is for the initial analyses on the National Survey of Black American data set. As specified in the body of this application, we are requesting this support primarily to permit the exploration of numerous hypotheses and questions regarding Black Americans and mental health. We have two general goals for the next three years: 1) to analyze those data that are policy relevant and therefore may become quickly dated with the passage of time; and 2) to analyze those data that bear upon the more unique and critical central purposes of the previous conceptual and data collection phase of the research, the areas of mental health, identity and social support. In addition to the analyses planned within these major areas of the survey, we are also requesting support to begin work on important relationships among mental health, social support, personal and group identity and consciousness. The quality, scope, size and representative nature of the data set make the projected analyses of major importance to policy-makers and scientists interested in these areas. In addition, the data themselves represent new and unique frameworks in the study of the mental health of Black Americans. Planned analyses will permit us to examine the efficacy of our new approaches providing important empirically based foundations for further analyses and for new national and smaller studies on similar issues.